7 things I've learned as an Amtrak 'writer in residence'

In September 2014, Amtrak announced the winners of its writers residency, a program sparked by one writer's tweet. The federally-owned passenger network offered free rides to any destination and back, with unlimited stops along the way. From a pool of 16,000 applicants, 24 got to ride the rails in a sleeper car at some time over the following year, meals included — and no writing for Amtrak required.

When Amtrak called to say I was one of the winners, I couldn't have been more thrilled. But I would come to be haunted by my perfectionist need to make the journey as long-lasting and incredible as possible. I wanted the most bang for my non-buck. Here's what I got.

1. You can take the rules to the limit — sort of.

The first resident to take his trip, Bill Willingham (author of Fables, one of the best comic book series I've ever read) simply picked somewhere he'd like to go (Seattle, in his case) and did a quick there-and-back-again from his nearest Amtrak station (Red Wing, Minnesota). Then he expressed wistfulness about not getting more time on the train.

"Twelve years from now," wrote Willingham in his diary on Amtrak's blog, "when the hundreds of Amtrak writers are in that bar, reminiscing, 'Short Haul' will be my beloved nickname, to which I'll smile and pretend not to mind it." (CBS News followed Willingham on his short haul; that report is below.)

That sealed it. If that fabled meeting of resident writers ever came, I wanted bragging rights as the guy who had taken the longest journey. And even though writing about the trip was entirely voluntary, my competitive urge had kicked in. I also wanted to be the guy who wrote the most about his adventure (although the incredibly prolific Jennifer Boylan set that bar pretty high).

Booking the journey itself was easier said than done. There was a good deal of fine print. Though I could get off the train as often as I wanted for as long as I wanted, I could only take a maximum of two train "numbers" on the way out, and two on the way back — numbers better known to rail passengers by their romantic names, such as Coast Starlight or Empire Builder.

This quirky rule meant that a one-day jaunt down the California coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example, would use up as much of my potential journey as a three-day hike from LA to New Orleans.

Once I proposed an itinerary that hewed to the rules, it still had to ping-pong around the Amtrak bureaucracy for more than six weeks. Apparently, I wasn't allowed to take any berth that might potentially be occupied by a paying passenger. It wasn't until five days before I was due to depart, presumably when sales slowed down, that the ticket was finally issued.

My plan: I would leave the Bay Area heading to Denver across the Sierras and the Rockies on the California Zephyr. I'd spend a day or so there before finishing the route in Chicago, take another two-day break, then head east again on the Lakeshore Limited all the way to New York City. The voyage home to the West Coast would take place on the Crescent, via stops in Atlanta and New Orleans, and the Sunset Limited via Houston.

I'm in New York City now, halfway through that journey, but I already feel like I've lived a lifetime on Amtrak trains. I'll update this list after the voyage home, but here are a few lessons from my residency so far:

The sleeper car on any train — full of what Amtrak charitably describes as "roomettes" — are not the most spacious location in the world from which to tap at a laptop. To quote a delightful phrase from one of the other writers' sleeper car attendants, there's so little room that "if you cussed out a cat you'd get fur in your mouth."

But the space in most of the roomettes, especially the Viewliner versions on East Coast trains, is cleverly designed. There are hooks everywhere from which to hang your stuff. There's a mini closet. If you're traveling alone, the upper bunk is a good place to stash your suitcase, as it disappears into the ceiling when you don't need it. The Viewliner has a flip-down sink and a flip-up toilet, which is surprisingly well disguised and hidden and not at all gross.

A roomette will set you back around $100 a night, if you upgrade from a regular ticket at the right time; here are some clues on how to do that.

The sleeper car attendant has free coffee running in a pot most of the day (tip them accordingly), there's power in each sleeper (it claims to be only for electric razors, but my laptop charged quite happily), and there are bathrooms and a shower with good water pressure just down the corridor. Some of the larger Viewliner rooms have showers built in, but I draw the line there — showers deserve separate rooms.

Best of all, the seats convert into a comfortable bed. If you really want to be decadent, leave it in the bed configuration all day, and enjoy the only form of transport in which you can lie down and read and watch America trundle past your window all day.

Bottom line? I was able to write almost constantly. And despite my original notion that I'd be able to digitally detox, I found laptops work much better than notebooks. In the latter, the rocking of the train can make your writing look like that of a drunken sailor.

3. But it's harder to do an Internet detox than you might think.

My dilemma when considering the journey, as I expressed below to my fellow writer-resident Ksenia Anske, is our modern always-on culture's dilemma in a nutshell:

I start my cross-country @Amtrak writer's residency next week! So excited. The question is: To tweet or not to tweet? cc: @kseniaanske

In the end, my hope was that the decision would be made for me by simple lack of cellular coverage. Not so much.

Even on AT&T, which as Verizon never tires of telling us doesn't cover as much of the country as its rival, I had a 4G connection more often than not. And when that connection gets spotty, you can get stuck in a loop of hitting reload in the hopes it will work this time.

The only solution? Put your phone in airplane mode, and only check it when you're on the platform at one of what Amtrak calls the "fresh air" (read: cigarette) stops along the way.

4. But really, it's all about the view.

There is one reason why working on an Amtrak is problematic, especially west of the Rockies. It's because you keep seeing stuff like this:

Nothing to be done about this kind of distraction. Just relax and soak in the inspiration.

5. Schedules are just a suggestion.

This is the big one, and it doesn't get talked about often enough. Yes, in general we know that Amtrak trains are late, to the point where they earn nicknames. The Coast Starlight is known as the "Coast Starlate"; the Lakeshore Limited has been dubbed the "Lateshore Limited."

Now this is fine if you're all about the journey rather than the destination, and that was my attitude for much of the trip.

I'd taken the week off; I had long layovers in all my destinations; I loved losing long, lazy hours writing and reading in my roomette on a slow train to nowhere.

But this attitude has its limits. I was fine with the train being an hour late out of the train yard to pick us up at the start of the line; I was steaming with fury as we crawled into Denver more than four hours behind schedule, because it meant evening plans I had with a Colorado friend I don't get to see very often were sunk. And that, as it turned out, was just the appetizer to the main course of lateness.

That came two days later, when I hopped back on the Zephyr to finish its journey in Chicago — and got stuck in what turned out to be a 14-hour delay. Ostensibly this was due to tornadoes in Iowa that led to flooding that led to a change of track.

The real reason? We'll get to that.

6. The staff is sadly used to delays — but the app is more informative.

In Japan, if a train is running a single minute late — literally, sixty seconds behind — the conductor will apologize over the tannoy. Five minutes late, and passengers are issued a delay certificate, which you can give to your employer or teacher by way of explanation.

On Amtrak? The only apology I recalled hearing was when the train scheduled to arrive at 2:50 p.m. finally limped into Chicago at 4:30 a.m. The few remaining passengers who hadn't switched to buses back at Omaha were groggy, scrambling to get off the train, and could be excused for missing it.

The Amtrak staff are almost all friendly, hard-working types. My sleeper attendant in the Zephyr on the way to Chicago told me that with all the delays (the train had been equally cursed going west), she'd only had six hours of sleep in the past five nights.

But train arrival times is not their strong suit; indeed, such updates seemed to be held as closely as state secrets. I heard more announcements about dining car seatings than I did about our near-constant state of delay.

My attendant was a good spy, and kindly passed on any scrap of information she overheard on the conductors' radios. But in general, I got my updated arrival times from the Amtrak iPhone app — not ideal for anyone trying to detox from the Internet, and given the spaces between coverage, not a reliable source of information either. (Not to mention that the app's estimates are, in the words of one conductor, "wildly optimistic.")

But hey, they're trying. And I will never forget Martin, the conductor in the Instagram above, going from carriage to carriage in his clown gear, in a doomed attempt to cheer up the terminally stuck passengers. "Excuse me, have you seen a man with a bird on his head?" he'd say to everyone, apropos of nothing.

7. Amtrak doesn't own track.

Nearly all of the track we ran on out west is owned by an independent company, Union-Pacific, and UP's main priority is freight traffic. There's never been more train traffic in the U.S., but nearly all of it is commercial freight. And commercial freight absolutely, positively has to be there — if not overnight, then certainly by a specific deadline.

That makes passenger trains — and human beings in general — little more than second-class freight.

UP can impose any speed limit or stoppage on any Amtrak train on its track at any time. If there's a UP train with the expensive stuff passing by, the Amtrak train is forced by its UP overseers to stand aside. If it suddenly needs to use different tracks, as happened with my Zephyr in Iowa, it must wait — for hours if necessary — while UP pilots certified to guide the train on that track can be located and driven to the train.

And if an Amtrak train is already horrifically delayed, there's absolutely no impetus for UP to help it make up time. The Amtrak is forced to limp along at minimal speed, shunned and shamed like some kind of plague train.

This process is entirely invisible to most potential passengers. All they see is a train of clownish conductors that can't get anywhere on time, where delay is the norm, where reliability is a quaint hope.

And that's a terrible shame, because Amtrak is a surpassingly beautiful way to travel. If there were only the political will to make it run on time — to legislate that people are more important than freight — we wouldn't necessarily need high-speed rail to make this service pay.

The landscape of America, viewed up close, would do that all by itself.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.